This took place on the evening of Saturday, the 13th of April, 1861.  The events of the next few days doubtless augmented his anxiety and unhappiness.  Sunday followed,—­a day filled not with a Sabbath calm, but with the stillness felt in nature before some awful convulsion; the silence preceding earthquake, volcano, or blasting storm; a quiet broken from Maine to the Pacific slope when the next day shone, and men roused themselves from the sleep of a night to the duty of a day, from the sleep of generations, fast merging into death, at the trumpet-call to arms,—­a cry which sounded through every State and every household in the land, which, more powerful than the old songs of Percy and Douglas, “brought children from their play, and old men from their chimney-corners,” to emulate humanity in its strength and prime, and contest with it the opportunity to fight and die in a deathless cause.

A cry which said, “There are wrongs to be redressed already long enough endured,—­wrongs against the flag of the nation, against the integrity of the Union, against the life of the republic; wrongs against the cause of order, of law, of good government, against right, and justice, and liberty, against humanity and the world; not merely in the present, but in the great future, its countless ages and its generations yet unborn.”

To this cry there sounded one universal response, as men dropped their work at loom, or forge, or wheel, in counting-room, bank, and merchant’s store, in pulpit, office, or platform, and with one accord rushed to arms, to save these rights so frightfully and arrogantly assailed.

One voice that went to swell this chorus was Surrey’s; one hand quick to grasp rifle and cartridge-box, one soul eager to fling its body into the breach at this majestic call, was his.  He felt to the full all the divine frenzy and passion of those first days of the war, days unequalled in the history of nations and of the world.  All the elegant dilettanteism, the delicious idleness, the luxurious ease, fell away, and were as though they had never been.  All the airy dreams of a renewed chivalrous age, of courage, of heroism, of sublime daring and self-sacrifice, took substance and shape, and were for him no longer visions of the night, but realities of the day.

Still, while flags waved, drums beat, and cannon thundered; while friends said, “Go!” the world stood ready to cheer him on, and fame and honor and greater things than these beckoned him to come; while he felt the whirl and excitement of it all,—­his heart cried ceaselessly, “Only let me see her—­once—­if but for a moment, before I go!” It was so little he asked of fate, yet too much to be granted.

In vain he went every day, and many times a day, in the brief space left him, to her hotel.  In vain he once more questioned clerk and servants; in vain haunted the house of his aunt, with the dim hope that Clara might hear from her, or that in some undefined way he might learn of her whereabouts, and so accomplish his desire.